Catching up on the fertilizing

On our little block, we don’t have a lot of space for a traditional compost heap. Most of our organic materials go through the chooks, worms or Bokashi.

Sometimes though, especially at this time of year, there’s an excess of some super-nutritious materials around. These are things such as Seagrass and Nettles which are provided in abundance for free.

These go into the pipe composters to break down into liquid gold for an immediate kick to the garden. I let some ferment for months in big jars and add it as a living culture throughout the rest of the year.

The chook poo percolator works in a similar way and gives us both a rich liquid fertilizer as well as taking the bite off of the chook poo and pigeon poo so that it’s not too strong for young plants.

This is the time too to break out the Bokashi vegetable scraps and get them into the worm farms and worm towers. This is an ongoing thing throughout the year but Winter slows the process of fermentation down and we get a bit of a back log of fermenting scraps. As soon as the warmth comes though, it kicks off with a vengeance and the scraps literally dissolve once they’re shared around.

This year, we have a problem though. We usually apply the Bokashi process to Athena’s poo. In the warmer weather and over previous Winters, this method works well for processing the large quantities that a Labrador loves to share.

This year, though, we’ve had more frosts than usual (4 days in a row once – unheard of!) and it seems to have killed off the bacteria in the bins. The poo just hasn’t fermented and remains, pretty well as it was put in.

That leaves us with a 60 litre bin of dog poo to try and dispose of safely. Ouch!